At any given time I have a set of fun little hacks I’m working on or wish I was working on. Here are the things I’m currently thinking about; in part I’m writing in the hope that someone will tell me that what I want already exists.
XBMC extensions for photo viewing and tagging: XBox media center is a great way to view computer content in the living room, and it’s open source and support for python scripting make it easy to extend. One extension I’d like to add is a way to make photo viewing interactive– I’d like to be able to hit a button to flag the best pictures for printing or tag them as a favorite. Another extension I’d like is Flickr for XBMC– a way to browse my Flickr collection on the Xbox. Given their web services API, this could probably be done entirely in Python.
Universal search plugin for Firefox: I like the search toolbar in Firefox, but it’s actually a bit of drag to have to select a search engine from the dropdown. Also, many sources of intranet content don’t yet have plugins, like Jobster’s corporate knowledge base in Confluence or our bug tracking database in JIRA. I’ve written a plugin that defers to a web page to intelligent select the appropriate search engine to based on the user’s query. If the search page doesn’t recognize the user’s query, it will default to Google, with a set of tabs across the top that allow you to run the same query on other search engines. If it recognizes the issue as a JIRA bug id, it will automatically go to that bug page in Jira. Special keywords allow the user to specify other search engines. All of the logic is in the web page, not the toolbar, so it’s easy to extend. Geeky but good.
Berry attachments: The Blackberry gives me instant, secure access to corporate email, but web pages inside the corporate firewall are off limits to me. I have also have no way to remotely search my Google Desktop. This program will be an Outlook plugin that recognizes specially formatted emails from me and replies back to me with the desired results, like the contents of the web page or the results of the Google Desktop search. This would be a bit like the Itrezzo, but hosted on your own PC, open source, extensible, and free.
A potential security nightmare but I think I can make it safe enough for my purposes. The SpamBayes plugin, written in Python, will make a good starting point for this.
Berry Bloglines 2.0: Berry Bloglines has some unique content reformatting features, but many user’s have reported compatability problem with their Blackberries, probably having to do with the way cookies are handled. I’d like to fix this with a smart frontend to the browser based pages.
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Do smart keywords not work for you?
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/smart-keywords.html
I suppose it’s unfortunately named.. Microsoft has trained me to assume that anything called “Smart” is exactly the opposite.
Or do they not work on intranet sites? (I’m at home, I can’t try it).
By Laurel Fan on 04.01.05 7:27 am
I find Berry Bloglines fantastically useful. Thanks heaps for making it available.
By Anonymous on 04.01.05 4:10 pm
Ask and you shall receieve. I’ve been working on this for a while, but now its done.
http://www.jonsthoughtsoneverything.com/2005/07/09/introducing-flickr-for-your-xbox-media-center/
By Jon on 07.09.05 1:07 pm
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